s far Islamist terrorism goes, maybe the Left should remember what Robespierre, the patriarch of modern day revolutionaries, said - "To punish the oppressors of humanity is benevolence; to be benevolent to them is barbarism." This, and this alone, is real Jacobinism.

Take a list of straw man arguments then knock them down with cut and paste using any paragraph from the web which might support the alternative view. This is journalism? This is political commentary? Well sadly it often is when we are talking about Israel...

Neither left, nor right, confronts the reality of an economic system built on the assumption that certain inputs, notably energy and minerals such as phosphorus and copper, are limitless and always easy to access...

I'm no fan of the Socialist Workers' Party, so I won't be losing much sleep over the fact that it is currently imploding under the weight of two sex scandals. But I do find it intriguing that this intellectually moribund organisation is having the final nail pounded into its coffin, not by the state or by the right, but by feminism.

He leans too far to the right to be Labour, and annoys his own backbenchers for implementing policy that aren't traditionally held party beliefs. His record abroad is impressive, but at home, much of the country has taken a dislike to Tony Blair... what you thought I was talking about David Cameron?

If rape jokes are to be banned, why not also ban murder jokes, incest jokes, adultery jokes and jokes about travelling salesmen, mothers in law and rabbits? All were certainly offensive to the ears of pre-War BBC Radio. It is a short and slippery slope from banning jokes to burning books.

The struggle against islamophobia is the struggle for a nuanced and ‎contextualised appraisal of events involving Muslims, a refusal to accept ‎that everything can be explained away through a facile reference to 'Islam' ‎and a defence of a European minority group. There is nothing Orwellian ‎about that.‎